Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming device, an image formation managing device, and an image forming method that allow printing on a continuous transfer medium.
Description of the Related Art
An image forming device sometimes performs image formation adjustment in the middle of a job exceeding a continuous printing distance. Examples of image formation adjustment include toner consumption adjustment. Toner consumption adjustment outputs a toner-emitting patch image, for example, on a middle transfer belt in order to change a degraded developer to a new one. For printing on sheet paper, toner consumption can be done by forming a toner consumption patch in a space between sheets. However, an image forming device treating roll paper and other continuous transfer mediums which do not have such a space is required to perform adjustment while conveying roll paper.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2015-55846, for example, provides an image forming device that forms an image on a continuous sheet of paper and performs image density control even during an image forming process. Specifically, the image forming device includes: image forming means that forms an image by transferring a toner image on an image holder to the continuous sheet of paper; and controlling means that controls the image forming unit such that, before the image is formed on the continuous sheet of paper, a density-adjusting toner image is formed on the image holder while the image holder and the continuous sheet of paper are apart from each other, that performs the first density control according to the density of the density-adjusting toner image, and that performs the second density control, which is different from the first density control, during image formation on the continuous sheet of paper while the image holder and the continuous sheet of paper are in contact with each other.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-84796 provides a space lying in the sub-scanning direction to place a patch.
However, when a job exceeding a continuous printing distance is performed in a printing operation on a continuous transfer medium, image formation adjustment is usually automatically performed after the distance, resulting in an unintended margin area, disruption of an image cycle with even spaces (1-mm space), and an unnecessary space between images due to paper conveying. Besides, although the user sometimes smoothly moves to the subsequent processing by inserting a blank at a break between jobs to separate the jobs, such an unintended margin may hinder such a smooth movement to the subsequence processing.